


Dreams, Recurring

by spacetango



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Emily needs a hug, because of course there is angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 08:36:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8198359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacetango/pseuds/spacetango
Summary: Emily’s childhood had to have left some scars.





	

From body to animate darkness. Just like that. One moment the ground is firm under her feet, the scraping of her shoes too loud when she tries to run, the next she’s hurtling forward, a sleek, nightmarish shadow. Before this—

(The events always play just slightly out of order.)

Emily screams, or thinks she does. The voiceless cannot scream, and so that panicked would-be scream is nothing but intent. She’s ten again, and the only shadows present are those cast by tall white columns. No: there’s another darkness there, spreading and slick and gleaming, but—

(Is it a mercy or a torment that she can never fully picture the fallen body of her mother?)

But hands grab her, though whose hands they are, the dream never shows.

It doesn’t have to.

This nightmare is a skewed retelling of events just on ten years gone. Nothing she can avoid; nothing she can control. Her nostrils twitch at the sharp scent of steel and gunpowder, her ears pick out the soft creak of leather, and her body—

Her body becomes smoke and Void.

Before that, for one second, two, she struggles, and she fights, and only when she becomes flesh once again and the grip relents—

(This is her most concrete memory of her mother’s murderer: his hold on her, letting go.)

Only then, does she stumble, falling. Cold stone beneath her small palms. A sick and sour feeling in her stomach. Dull buzzing in her ears as voices form jagged words she strains to make out but never fully fathoms, and at the edge of all that human noise, _another_ sound, slinking. Another _voice_ , smooth and precise and boyish.

It’s silky, that dream voice, too much so.

She wakes with a convulsive jolt on the cold floor. There’s a pulpy cling around her legs, like making contact with unseen things in dark water, and she kicks out with all the force of a drowning woman desperate to escape murky depths. Her heart races, and it is laborious and willful work getting her jaw to unclench. More work: parsing the thing she kicked away as nothing but her sweat drenched sheets.

If she bruised falling out of bed, she’s still too disoriented to tell. Flesh always feels cumbrous in the nightmare’s aftermath. She counts out her breaths while tapping out a quiet rhythm on her sternum, until the nightmare’s reach recedes and she can take in the clear light of dawn without wincing.

Spikes of too bright sunlight carve long shapes on the polished parquet floor. Her bed looms large and empty. From her position, she can just make out the mud pattern on the boot she carelessly discarded after last night’s rooftop jaunt.

(The detail she remembers most: a child clutching her doll in her sleep.)

Emily pulls herself up. She imagines strings threaded through her wrists, her ankles, her neck, directing her movements. It’s a dispassionate sort of ideation, neat and contained like a diagram in a natural philosophy book, and she’s never quite certain if it’s one of the dream’s leftovers.

Her throat reluctantly works. “I’m Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin,” she tells the morning light, toneless. An exercise Sokolov suggested to shake off the dream’s cloying weight, and one she now performs by rote. “I’m twenty. I’m in Dunwall Tower. This is my home. I am the Empress of the Isles.”  

Facts: an imprecise and very human ward, because—

(A thought as unsettling as that soft dream voice gnaws at her.)

She feels this is the language of past trauma lending itself to an omen.

**Author's Note:**

> If Dishonored 2 was just Emily and Shadow Walk, I’d still buy it. TAKE MY MONEY ARKANE TAKE MY SOUL


End file.
